Why Buy with Us?

Our buyer purchased a single family home in a neighborhood with a homeowners association. All of the exterior windows were replaced with a completed permit by the seller prior to listing the home, so the Department of Building Inspection approved the windows. However, we knew that this neighborhood association also had to approve the windows, so we made sure we had a contingency in the contract that required the seller to confirm that the HOA had approved the windows. It turned out that the seller did not receive the necessary permission from the HOA and all of the brand-new windows had to be replaced with HOA-approved materials. This effort cost the seller $40,000, a cost that would have been borne by the buyer clients after closing escrow had we not caught this lack of permission and written the clause into our offer.

We always check to make sure the advertised parking space in a condo building is the actual parking space that is deeded or assigned to the unit. In one case, the condo map did not include the page with the garage. The title company told us that this page was not available, so we called the surveyor who drew up the condo map years before. They provided us with the condo map, and we found out that the advertised parking space was not, in fact, the one that was deeded to this unit. In the end, our client got a much better parking space!

After seeing several “clues”, such as extra thick/plush carpeting in the bedrooms, security cameras throughout the building, and a blocked-off staircase between the two units in this condo building, we were suspicious. We researched the other owner in the building and found out that she had filed not just one lawsuit against the current owners/sellers, but also multiple prior owners of the unit that was for sale. We advised our clients to walk away, and we found them a much better home.

A buyer fell in love with a single family home that had a big open garage where he could put his woodworking shop. The house was built in the 1920’s, so we knew it wasn’t originally built with a big open garage. There were telltale signs that modifications were done… lighter colored cement squares on the garage floor where vertical support posts were removed… a laminated header beam that was not used in 1920’s construction. We checked the building permit history report to see when these alterations were made, but there was no mention of the new support beam. We checked the seller disclosures (they had owned the house for over 40 years) and found nothing. When we asked the agent about this work, they let us know that the sellers forgot to include this work on their disclosures, and that they did the work themselves. Apparently, they were very handy. This was a big red flag because this beam carried the weight of the entire house, and there was no way to retroactively determine if it was properly engineered for the job. I convinced my client to walk away. Not only could the house be structurally unsound, but it could also have affected his re-sale process down the line.